Prices rise and fall for solar components. Seeing that a lot of bidding was happening in the background of most solar deals, it made sense for Sunhub to structure an online marketplace around negotiations. But Sunhub is much more than a typical e-commerce site. Its trusted team is present throughout purchases to navigate manufacturers, distributors, EPCs, solar contractors and individuals ensuring safe and seamless deals. Here’s how we work in the background of our Solar Trader Platform to vet suppliers, moderate negotiations, generate contracts and facilitate payments for better solar equipment procurement.
How Sunhub facilitates solar component procurement
The lack of a common language between buyers and sellers makes purchasing components from some websites confusing. Sunhub responded to this critical market need with the industry’s first solar trader platform. The e-procurement tool makes it faster and easier for residential, commercial and utility buyers to negotiate better pricing. In addition to its procurement engine, our team takes an active role in transactions to ensure convenient, secure procurement.
Verifying suppliers
There’s no fear of working with sketchy sellers when you shop on Sunhub. We go through a heavy vetting process that includes background checks and proper documentation to ensure supplier legitimacy. Our external business verification services check that companies are federally registered with a valid tax ID and haven’t been reported on any government watch list. This helps keep transactions safe.
Moderating flexible negotiations
Sunhub’s team of procurement experts moderate anonymous price and term negotiations between verified buyers and sellers in a convenient chat-based interface. The platform allows negotiating any sales terms possible and capturing those in a contract. Our generated contracts include all the traditional fields as well and an additional terms section that’s available for referencing any other agreement aspects.
Typical contract terms include:
Incoterms: Incoterms, common terms of sale, help define the responsibilities of buyers and sellers. Sunhub includes a dropdown selection for outlining 11 internationally recognized rules in its contract form to specify who will pay logistical expenses such as shipping and tariffs.
Pricing: When you have contract flexibility, it’s not always about the cheapest price. Unlike platforms like eBay, the highest bidder doesn’t necessarily win. Terms can make a big difference in closing a deal. On Sunhub, manufacturers and distributors have the ability to sell to multiple buyers for different costs and terms. This approach mimics typical solar procurement negotiations that happen over the phone in a more convenient, efficient online interface.
Delivery: Determining delivery schedule is especially important in larger deals. The right products must be brought to a project for installation at the right time. If needed, Sunhub can help buyers find sellers and fill in gaps with logistics and warehousing services. Most of the time, we can find storage within 10 to 15 miles of your project and arrange logistics for delivery.
Payment: Noting how much will be paid upfront and then along the way helps buyers and sellers plan better and manage cash flow. Those who can put more money down may negotiate a better deal.
With the ability to negotiate terms and engage in transactions facilitated by Sunhub, buyers can enjoy fast, flexible agreements. Sunhub’s moderation of buyer inquiries also helps reduce noise for sellers by cutting out unreasonable bids and spam. Our overseeing of negotiations helps provide a better experience for everyone involved.
Generating contracts
Sunhub captures final agreements by auto-generating a legally binding contract. As the custodian of contracts, Sunhub is the only entity that can make changes. Buyers and sellers submit requests to update terms within the chat and, if both parties agree, we can edit the agreement.
With a third party in charge of modifications, transactions stay transparent and fair. Nothing can be changed after the fact. Up-to-date contract terms are clearly displayed for both buyers and sellers throughout negotiations. Sunhub creates separate buyer and seller contracts, which allows us to offer buyers additional logistics services if needed.
Preserving anonymity
Sunhub maintains buyer/seller anonymity to grant buyers and sellers the privacy they need to freely negotiate deals. With discussion, sellers can be more nimble in offering flexible inventory and pricing.
Securing payments
Sunhub employs trusted payment methods like ACH and Stripe, which is used by Amazon and other retail giants, to ensure more reliable, safe payments for sellers because we have buyer account and contact information. Similar to Amazon, Sunhub collects and distributes payments to sellers, eliminating the need to chase down outstanding invoices. At the same time, if products arrive damaged, or there is any other problem, we’ll try to resolve it by working with the supplier and can refund payment to the buyer if necessary.
By guiding buyers and sellers along solar panel, battery, inverter and other product transactions and providing additional services to fill in gaps, Sunhub helps get more solar deals done. We are the only e-commerce marketplace allowing solar buyers to negotiate prices, terms and logistics on extensive solar inventory. The combination of our innovative technology backed by a dedicated team enables flexible, secure solar procurement that is essential for business growth as well as the advancement of U.S. solar deployment.
Shop our Solar Trader deal listings today or reach out to learn more about how we can help.